


Remember: be better

by laudanum_and_wine



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Freeform, Give Miller happy memories 2020, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-11-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:21:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27591961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laudanum_and_wine/pseuds/laudanum_and_wine
Summary: Julie sees every time he flirts with death, and it breaks her heart. She can't stop watching, until he's there, hand in hers.Weirdly freeform version of fhe Protomolicule-as-Julie rifling through Joe's memories and making herself sad.
Relationships: Julie Mao/Joe Miller
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Remember: be better

She has been waiting, and she didn't realize it until just now.

They are in a hotel, and she is standing next to him begging him to touch her, touch, contact, please, and he breathes in- well. They all breathe, to be fair. They all breathe and pump blood and digest and secrete and a thousand other things every moment they exist in time, but what matters is they breathe. Right now.

There are five of them, sharing her air (sharing her) and she feels the black roots of her thoughts reach out, forward and back, finding one, choosing. She doesn't remember her name until he whispers it to her.

"Oh, Julie."

And then Julie knows herself, knows Juliette Andromeda Mao, knows Josephus Aloisus Miller, and faster than she can register a part of her unspools out and remembers things she never saw.

Julie sees every time he flirts with death, and it breaks her heart. Every time he has the thought, "Well, it was a good run," and relaxes into what he thinks is inevitable, every time he exhales shakily and expects never to draw another breath, every time he registered a near-miss only moments after the potential for a fatality has passed.

The first time he couldn't have even been in his twenties, and the youth on his face shocks her, seeing his cheeks with the thin layer of what amounts to baby fat on a Belter. Part of her mind unspools, she can feel it playing something else out (a puffy haired little girl playing with a sparrow, a memory of metallic tasting milk with all the wrong supplements, a screaming match with Candice over wasted years, a whisper in the darkness like a prayer delivered over the flat plane of stomach below a navel, the taste of blood) but this her stays in the moment and sees him.

They're going on a spacewalk, Star Helix paid, to ensure they have training on it even though they'll likely never need to go outside again. If security is outside the station shit is deeply fucked up. He's only been working security for a few months, still excited: maybe he'll be good at this, maybe he'll love space and take a totally new job, maybe Candice will stop by tonight.

Julie doesn't pull away from that thought, she is gently pushed away, she is externally removed, and she almost remembers the difference between herself and others, and thus how she got here but-

The airlock is about to cycle, the first team about to step out, and Miller's com is off. She sees the tear in his suit's lining, sees the rip, she's not sure if she's imagining it but thinks she can feel the frayed edges of the fabric. His com is off. The airlock depressurizes. He can hear the hiss. His com is OFF.

The instructor has seen his wild eyes and has mercifully understood. The older man re-cycles the airlock, the hissing of Miller's suit is drowned out by the air returning. 

It wasn't that near a thing, wasn't that close to death, but still Julie shudders.

"What are you looking at?"

The images spin past in a series of near misses: a hopped up Martian with a knife, an unexpected stumble during a riot, a plastic bullet flattened against a wall when he didn't even know the guy had a gun-

He is in his thirties, she guesses, and he is bleeding again, and he cannot see her trying to press hands to the wound, he cannot see her kneeling begging him to get up, Joe, get back up. She knows he will. She begs anyway. 

Miller is clutching the knife in his side, obviously resisting the temptation to pull it out. He slides his fingers around it, presses down, direct pressure to slow bleeding, and thinks hard. If Miller pulls it out he can probably chase the guy down, slowly, and put a round in the punk's fucking head before he passes out himself. If he leaves it in and calls for help he'll lose the stab-happy little shithead but will stay conscious until backup arrives.

He shouldn't have to pause, shouldn't consider giving chase, only… Only maybe if he does and he dies, Candice will get the insurance money. If he lives, maybe she'll come to the hospital. Maybe she'll see him, actually see HIM, for the first time in what, years? A decade?

It's a terrible thing to realize you've got nothing to live for only once you're bleeding out.

Julie yells at him, but he can't hear her, doesn't react. 

It takes long minutes for him to get up, but he leaves the knife in, and doesn't black out. Julie knows Candice comes to the hospital, cries over him, and they cobble together their love for another dozen years. She knows this even though all she can see is his limping form pressing streaks of his own blood onto the walls of Ceres with each shakey handhold. She knows, doesn't know how she knows, and turns away-

He is forty nine and looks like hers, and is bleeding. She is kneeling over him, trying to wipe blood from his upper lip, and he still cannot see her.

They are in an airlock, and Miller gasping, thinking it's sort of hilarious he's back here in a fucking airlock AGAIN. He wants to hold his breath, wants to get a big lungful of air and hold it, make it last. Somehow that makes sense to him, make it a final breath just like holding your breath in the shower. But he's already panting, exhausted, fingers and arms aching from trying to wrench himself out of the closing airlock, legs bruised where he'd fallen back to the ground.

Not ground for long: it was about to be a door. And he couldn't get enough air, panting, they didn't give him a chance to get a breath to hold, and god this wasn't how he thought this would go, he was hoping he'd be more dignified god damn it, thought he'd at least be missed, but suddenly there's a shot, blood, and sound comes back, and there is Muss-

Part of Julie spools away again, having come back with a fleeting series of images (drinks with the guys becoming drinks alone become drinks with Muss, clothes-lining a guy she was chasing, drunk dancing too close in a loud bar, Tavi gasping his name in the dark, fights in poorly lit corridors) gone again before it explains anything.

Miller is gasping on the floor of the airlock, he and Julie both looking up at Muss who is saving his life.

Julie turns, wants to kiss his brow, tell him to breathe, but there is a shimmer. She sees him seeing her see him see her see-

They are in a hotel, and she is standing next to him telling him do not touch her, do not, don't fucking touch her. He cannot hear her. 

He inhales and she thinks that anaerobic doesn't prohibit airborne transmission, and the room has been closed, filling with it, with her, a black spreading tree under a glittering blue sky and he inhales and-

As his fingers cross the air, cross the dangerous and deadly and seemingly innocuous air, she feels him feel her for the first time. His hand has already stopped moving when the other man tells him not to touch her. The others go.

She feels herself in a thousand places, but knows she is not in the husk at the bottom of the shower stall. The unspooled parts of her have returned, have felt along neurons and time and coalesced into Julie again, faster than he could breathe.

"I was not there, I did not-"

"Julie."

And he stands, following those others out, and she thinks he heard her but- 

She looks at him from along a corridor, wants to brush his damp hair back, touch his lips, but he will not feel her fingers, will not see her. 

She looks at him, sad, heartbroken.

And he

looks

back.

Time moves forward, and now she is trapped in it more thoroughly. She has two data points to track: herself and Miller. She perceives in two dimensions, in something like real time.

It almost distracts her from a lethal dose of radiation. She wasn't paying attention when he was hit with the energy, but then again he didn't observe that moment either. It was a non-event, subatomic by nature, but still Julie knows every punctured cell, every displaced electron in him. Like a tear in a vac-suit she can feel along the edges. 

He is lying on the floor, and she can hear his body shutting down. He sneezes. She listens as his stomach lining sloughs and bleeds. She doesn't want to hear, but can no longer turn that off.

He is flippant and angry with his companion, justifying his violence. Julie cannot judge his violence, does not see this as a moral dilemma. Life and death are not moral dilemmas any longer, no more than flowers blooming, no more than the movement of stars in the sky. However. However, Julie thinks, and this is important: he is lying to himself.

He doesn't want to be what he is, and so she asks him to change, for her, for him, be better and-

She doesn't hear the words from his lips because she's busy listening to his hands. She is startled, and stands before him seconds or hours later to smile, pleased with his decision. He is bleeding more now, but smiles back, closer to dead but not yet. He will do better, she knows, he knows. 

She spends an eternity watching him

"Julie, what are you-"

He is sleeping, and she watches from the door. Julie realizes time is dashing forward, so she watches a lot, tries to be there as much as her waivering attention will let her. Mostly he sleeps.

When he wakes he sees her, looks up with sad eyes, it is the first time she spends with him that he is not dying. Well, not dying quickly. She is painfully aware of the still-ragged holes in his structure, the tears and damage, the wild growth of cancer which is not treatable or preventable but rather kept at bay. She can hear his cells grow and divide and die.

Perhaps his sadness is a reflection of her own.

Miller sits up, blinks slowly, waits for her to disappear. Julie sits on the edge of his bunk, brushes away a curl of his hair. The air does not stir, his hair does not move, the mattress of the bunk does not dip under her weight, but he almost feels it. Feels the memory of it, perhaps.

"You belong with me."

They both close their eyes, and are not sad, just in this moment. 

He's in a vac-suit now, helmet off, holding a gun.

She's never been here, never seen here, never heard of here, but Julie knows the strange halls of Thoth station. Some part near her, not of her, analogous to her perhaps? Some part tells her that this is Wisdom, born of War, and that she hates the man in the clean linen suit and will kill him-

Miller does not lead the breaching team, but is near the front. It is quiet. It is dark. Diogo speaks, says something, and there is a noise, and Diogo drops. Miller assumes he is about to die too. It's not the worst death.

The breaching team unloads most of their magazines into the security crew before Miller can check on the boy and he's not dead, shot instead with crowd control rounds. 

Miller sets his pending death aside for now, on a shelf in his mind where he can ignore it. He has work to do, and cannot die yet, because he owes at least that much to Julie, but later. 

"Hey, what are you looking at?"

"Everything," she replies.

He didn't die on Thoth, and it's so he can die here, with Julie, die here again, and he says that outloud. He gently pats his nuclear bomb companion and waits for the Nauvoo to kill him.

Miller sits, thinking he is alone, and does not hear her behind him. Does not see her hand upon his arm. When he chooses death it is hard for him to forget his ego and see, really see her.

Julie feels a part of her screaming, feels a wrench under the space where her ribs should be (too many ribs, miles of ribs, like a snake) and grins. Not for Miller, just for herself, just for the pleasure of smiling, of running-

All the unspooled parts of her are pulling, like a pack of running dogs, like the panic of the crowds of Eros fleeing from her. Joe is standing, Joe is speaking, she cannot hear. She is being swept away. She reaches out for him, hands out, and he steps away taking his per bomb to-

"Find me."

"I'm right here."

She is running, racing, going to win. It is all of her. All the unspooled parts have come home. She is complete, she is whole, she is the sum of so many parts. She can feel the push of her engines, she can almost taste the rattling shake in her teeth (too many teeth?) and can see the curves of her ship like it's under her hands (too many there too). She cannot remember her name, only her ship-

"Razorback, Razorback, Razorback, and she's gone."

"Come back to me, kid."

It takes a long time for her to piece herself together, to become Julie again, but she does.

"I can't feel my hands," she says. She knows she should be able to, knows what feeling should feel like. 

"They're right here-" and he holds them, and she can feel them through him now. She cannot feel his touch on her skin, but can feel her skin on his own.

She feels herself destroy the bomb, feels herself leak into the timer, into the fuse, into the complex mechanisms of the thing, without even thinking. When she becomes Julie again, Miller has removed half his vac-suit and is leaning against the dead bomb. Anaerobic does bot mean harmless, does not mean safe, and he knows it. She knows he knows it because she can feel his hands and the brush of his hair and his mind. 

"You belong with me."

And his lips.

"Julie, what are you looking at?"

"You," she says to him, to herself, as an aside. 

It has been days since they set course for Venus, and will be millennia until they arrive, they have almost forever. They are wrapped around each other, held close, unmoving. She thinks they may be dead. She cannot tell, it does not matter.

"You were looking at me?" He sounds nervous, almost, embarrassed or self conscious.

"Every part, Joe. I'm glad you made it to me, I'm glad you came here, I'm glad you tried," he doesn't seem reassured. The part of Julie that remains solely Julie is nervous too, but that is less of her over time. "I watched you grow up, and love, and risk your life. And you belong here." 

Her fingers ghost along his forehead, and he feels it, closes his eyes, leans into her touch even though their bodies (so far away) do not move, have not moved for days.

They have hours before impact. They have ages. It will never be enough time but then again, Miller thinks (and Julie nods, even though she can taste the grief), it never is enough. He will take it anyway. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was so flippin fun to write.


End file.
